New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies

ISSN: 1523-9543

New literacies emerge and evolve apace as people from all walks of life engage with new technologies, shifting values and institutional change, and increasingly assume 'postmodern' orientations toward their everyday worlds. Despite many efforts to take account of such changes, educational institutions largely remain out of touch with the range of new ways of making and sharing meanings that increasingly mediate and shape the lives of the young people they teach and the futures they face. This series aims to explore some key dimensions of the changes occurring within social practices of literacy and the educational challenges they present, with a view to informing educational practice in helpful ways. It asks what are new literacies,how do they impact on life in schools, homes, communities, workplaces, sites of leisure, and other key settings of human cultural engagement, and what significance do new literacies have for how people learn and how they understand and construct knowledge? It aims to challenge established and 'official' ways of framing literacy, and to ask what it means for literacies to be powerful, effective, and enabling under current and foreseeable conditions. Collectively, the works in this series will help to reorient literacy debates and literacy education agendas.

120 publications

Critical Literacies and Language

One of the most fundamental aspects of a just society is the right to create equitable and inclusive spaces of belonging for all people while also confronting injustice and oppression. However, we are now in a time where seeking justice and equity is met with neoliberalism, which pervades the academy at all levels of education. Yet, for many, this is not a time for retreat, but rather a moment of solidarity, a time to create new knowledge and understanding through struggle. As Freire wrote, "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." Thus, the purpose of this series is to provide literacy and language researchers, practitioners, as well as community activists, with a space to actualize and embody a restless, impatient never-finished objective of critical literacies and language education. It is the aim of this series to create a space to share research that promotes pedagogies of equity. We also recognize that different audiences have different needs. To that end, we seek to provide, when applicable, a "notebook" as a companion to research volumes to facilitate actionable steps for the PK-12 classroom or community spaces. This series is different as it approaches the dissemination of critical work from a place of intentionality to address the gap in disseminating research (typically read by scholars) and the need to have it "on the ground" for classroom teachers, community activists, and workers. By creating companion volumes (where applicable), there is a greater chance for sustained criticality in literacy education.

2 publications

LaCuLi. Language Culture Literacy

In the LaCuLi. Language Culture Literacy series, studies in foreign language research and intercultural communication will be published, as well as studies in foreign-language didactics. Research on the processes of language acquisition and language teaching, with a special focus on language awareness, cultural awareness and learner perspectives, is central to the series. It focuses on empirical research in intercultural foreign didactics as well as on cultural aspects of the workplace. Multi-perspective, multi-language and multi-cultural comparative approaches are highlighted. Fields of application are comparative analyses of political speeches, news, ads and business communication in an international context, as well as in learner texts in multi-language and multi-cultural learning environments. In der Reihe LaCuLi. Language Culture Literacy erscheinen Studien zur Fremdsprachenlehr- und -lernforschung und Interkulturellen Kommunikation sowie zur Fremdsprachendidaktik. Im Zentrum stehen Forschungsergebnisse im Bereich von Spracherwerbs- und -vermittlungsprozessen mit den Schwerpunkten Language und Cultural Awareness und Lernerperspektivität, ebenso empirische Untersuchungen zur interkulturellen Fremdsprachendidaktik sowie zu kulturellen Aspekten des Arbeitsplatzes. Im Fokus stehen mehrperspektivisch, mehrsprachig und mehrkulturell vergleichende Herangehensweisen. Anwendungsfelder sind vergleichende Analysen von politischen Reden, Nachrichten, Werbetexten und Businesskommunikation im internationalen Kontext sowie von Lernertexten in mehrsprachigen und multikulturellen Lernumgebungen.

20 publications

Critical Studies in Democracy and Political Literacy

ISSN: 2166-5036

Why do so few people vote? What is political engagement? How does education intersect with democracy and political literacy? What can be learned from interdisciplinary studies on democracy? How do we cultivate political literacy? What is the relevance of elections in light of war, poverty, discrimination, social inequalities, etc.? What are the alternatives to the traditional electoral, representative, party-politics models that have characterized our societies? Is the mainstream media holding government to account, disseminating propaganda or fuelling the need to pacify the population? How do international systems, approaches and realities related to democracy compare, and what can we learn from others? These are some of the questions that are addressed through this book series. Seeking to fill an important gap in the literature, this book series takes on the theme of democracy in a multi-/inter-disciplinary, comprehensive, and critical way. Some books have democracy in the title but do not make it the focus, and often books that address more directly, for example, multiculturalism, media studies, or school reform may delve into the area of democracy without fully deconstructing what it is, how it functions, how people can shape and intersect with it, and how it is used (or misused) to distort power relations, which is at the base of teaching, learning and action. Thus, a broader range of materials specifically tailored to teacher-education and scholars within the education field is desirable. Similarly, the overlapping and interdisciplinary nature of the study of democracy bleeds naturally into the areas of media studies, sociology, political science, peace studies, multiculturalism, feminist studies, and cultural studies, etc., all of which have a natural and inextricable relationship to and within education.

6 publications